Grim as they were, the ghettos and barrios of America looked better than the jungles of wartime Vietnam to a lot of university students in the early 1970s. Under a federal program aimed at filling a desperate shortage of inner-city teachers, young men and women could opt to serve their country in the 'hood.
One who answered the call was Virginia Berninger. Just out of college and ready for a stint in the real world before heading back to academia as a graduate student, Berninger spent a year teaching 50 African American and Puerto Rican third-graders in the heart of Philadelphia—no bombs, no napalm, but a jungle just the same.
"We had police escorts because of the gangs in the streets," she says, recalling the rawness of the children's lives with fresh force some three decades later. "I had kids who didn't return from vacation because they were killed or they died of encephalitis, things like that. It was a real eye-opener."
Evenings, she took classes at Temple University, where she delved into the psychology of reading—a natural for a psychology major who'd had a lifelong fascination with how the brain processes the written word and why some children struggle to learn.
Berninger's graduate education at the Johns Hopkins University was in experimental psychology, focusing on the three areas she thought "held the clue to figuring out what to do with learning disabilities"—cognitive psychology, psychobiology, and psycholinguistics. Her postdoctoral work took her to Boston Children's Hospital, where she taught with a group of physicians from all over the country about child development and learning disabilities and worked in clinics serving children with developmental and learning disorders.
Eventually, she and her husband, Ron—an organic chemist turned biomedical research scientist—came west, after each received a job offer in Seattle on the same day. "Our families thought we were nuts, because both our families have been on the East Coast for generations," she says, and then jokes, "A lot of people felt we went to another country."
Now a widely published professor in the University of Washington College of Education School Psychology Program and director of the UW Multidisciplinary Learning Disabilities Center, Berninger designs and oversees cutting-edge research on the brain-based learning disorders and strategies for addressing learning differences. The center, one of several such centers housed at universities around the nation (including Yale and Georgetown), is engaged in research on brain imaging, as well as genetic clues to learning disabilities. The UW brain imaging team, headed by Todd Richards and Elizabeth Aylward, has discovered, for example, that dyslexic children differ from good readers in brain activation associated with several language tasks, but these differences disappear after instructional intervention. (For more on Berninger's research and writings, see "Why Can't I Read?".)
I find that teachers are hungry for information about the brain.
Sitting in her office among teetering paper towers of research reports and scholarly journals, Berninger shares a sampling of her knowledge and experience with Northwest Education.
NORTHWEST EDUCATION: Why is it important for teachers to study the brain?
VIRGINIA BERNINGER: I find that teachers are hungry for information about the brain. Yet, there's so much bogus information out there. It's very easy to be naïve—to not be a critical consumer of what's out there. There are a lot of people who are capitalizing on this gap in teachers' knowledge. It also concerns me because teachers are expected to help kids learn and develop, and the major organ for that is the brain. Yet, they are given no training for this in their teacher education programs. That's one of the reasons we wrote our textbook (Berninger, V.W., and Richards, T.L, Brain Literacy for Educators and Psychologists, Academic Press, 2002). Neuroscience has been around for about 150 years, and we're getting to the point where there are certain general principles that are givens—a body of shared knowledge. Not that we fully understand the brain by a long shot. But if you don't understand these principles, you're going to remain a naïve consumer of this information.
NW: If learning disabilities occur in only about 10 percent of the population, as many experts suggest, why do general education teachers need to concern themselves with this?
BERNINGER: We have learned that there's an incredible amount of normal variation in learning processes among the general population. We did a study in a very large school looking at kindergartners and first-graders. We started with intensive, one-and-a-half-hour testing of each child at the end of kindergarten. Then we followed them to the end of first grade, going back five times to test all of these kids on reading and related skills. So I really had a chance to look at this longitudinal unfolding of the process. When we started, the teachers said: "We need to tell you that this is a very homogeneous group. These kids all learn to read. You're not going to find a lot of variation here." Well, surprise, it was just incredibly diverse. I don't think the public, the politicians, parents, teachers understand how much diversity they're dealing with inside the minds of learners. I stayed in touch with the psychologist at that school, and she said: "Ginger, you were right on. All the kids you flagged for us in first grade who were at risk because they couldn't do tasks based on phonological awareness—they couldn't segment words into phonemes and they couldn't write their alphabet letters from memory—these are the kids who continued to have difficulties in high school."
NW: You have done a lot of investigation into the connection between reading and writing difficulties.
BERNINGER: I couldn't help but notice that the kids with reading problems generally also had writing problems. Writing disabilities are less understood, even, than reading disabilities. One of the first grants I got was looking at individual differences among children in their abilities to write letters, words, sentences, and texts. The sample populations were local, but they were collected to be representative of the U.S. population in terms of ethnicity and parents' educational levels. I was looking for the early developmental origin of writing problems, instead of waiting until the upper elementary or middle school years after years of chronic failure. We think we found it: It's handwriting and it's spelling. And, more importantly, it's handwriting "automaticity"—how automatically the student can make those letters so they're not drawing them. It needs to be automatic so you're not using valuable mental resources for making the letters, and you have more room to think about what you want to say and how you're going to say it. In the beginning stages of spelling, it's not truly visual. It's a way of representing the sound system of spoken language. So children who have trouble with that sound system, with those phonemes and translating or mapping those phonemes onto letters, are the ones who have the spelling difficulty. We really emphasize that the handwriting lesson is not independent seatwork. It must be teacher led, because part of the secret is that you're constantly naming the letters for the kids. But teaching these systems explicitly is not the prevailing way that writing is taught. Most schools use whole language and journal writing, where there isn't a lot of explicit instruction and attention to transcription. Journal writing doesn't get at the social part—sharing your work—which is often what motivates kids. And journal writing doesn't give them topics. Where a lot of kids have trouble—beyond handwriting and spelling—is planning. So first you need to teach kids how to write the letters, and then you need to give them something to write about—a plan—and let them read it out loud. Maybe other people can't read their handwriting or spelling, but they can still share. We tell them that great authors like to read their work to other people. Sharing is definitely the motivational link for reluctant writers. I think the whole-language approach may have created a lot of writing disabled kids—kids who are curriculum casualties, not biologically based writing casualties.
NW: But curriculum design doesn't hold all the answers, does it?
BERNINGER: We knew it wasn't totally curriculum, because let's be honest, there are an awful lot of kids out there, even with whole language, who do pretty well. So our study also looked at writing from a neurodevelopmental point of view: What brain processes were causing the handwriting and the spelling to break down? Although some children are at risk because of biological risk factors—genes, brain wiring—it doesn't mean they can't learn. It's just that for them, it really matters what kind of instruction they get. It needs to be explicit. This doesn't mean you have to drill them to death. It means that you have to make it really clear and obvious to them. You have to take all these skills and break them down into their little pieces and help them learn all the processes. Using a lot of statistics—with the able assistance of Robert Abbott, a professor of statistics and chair of educational psychology—we were able to identify which processes were the best predictors of handwriting and which were the best predictors of spelling. From that, we developed a battery of assessment measures that can be used for screening and identifying those kids who are most at risk and for diagnosing persistent writing problems. We spent the next seven years doing instructional interventions to validate what works to fix the kids at risk. We wanted to cast our net widely and help as many kids as possible, so we went into first-, second-, and third-grade classrooms and found all the kids who were low achieving in various writing and reading skills. But we designed interventions based on what we had learned about the neurological processes that might be breaking down.
NW: So schools need to look at curriculum first?
BERNINGER: What we really should be doing when we design intervention plans is to start by assessing the curriculum, not the child. We need to ask, given what we know from research, what are the necessary instructional components that need to be in place? Let's not blame the teachers. Let's not blame the families. Some people still think LD kids are from dysfunctional families and have a motivational problem because they don't produce. That's not the case. These kids don't come from dysfunctional families any more than anyone else. So let's look in the classroom, let's see what's been tried, and see if we can help the school tweak it, add some things, delete some things, modify some things.
NW: How does the teacher know whether her approach is working on an individual basis—whether each child is making sufficient gains?
BERNINGER: It's got to be an integrated assessment-intervention approach. You need to build in daily progress monitoring—a way for the child to get a little sense of progress. You need to quickly get the kids to feel like, "I can do it"—to feel like they're readers and writers—because motivation is such an important part. You need to set goals and monitor progress weekly, monthly, and twice a year using a variety of modes of assessment—curriculum based, criterion referenced, norm referenced, portfolios. A lot of teachers just aren't comfortable with the assessment role, and they don't do it. That's why they don't know that some kids aren't making it. If a kid sits there smiling or is socially appropriate or says cute things, the teacher just doesn't realize there's a problem.
NW: What strategies have you developed that help ensure that all kinds of learners grasp reading in the early years?
BERNINGER: We have found that kids' word recognition gets better when they work on both the alphabetic principle and comprehension—that you really need to teach all of it. So we've tried to integrate the best of the skills approach with the best of whole language. From the research, we've learned that you need phonological, orthographic, and morphological awareness to learn to read and spell words. You need to work on vocabulary, morphology, and syntax to develop sentence-level understanding. To develop text discourse, there's text structure and text processing. We know these general principles. But is there more than one way to teach orthographic, phonological, morphological awareness, and text structure? Of course there is. That's where the professionalism of teachers comes in. I don't think each teacher should be a robot following the leader's instructions. But we need to make sure at each grade level—where individual children are developmentally—that the critical component skills are in place in the curriculum. And then let the teacher use her own creativity. I think teachers need a toolbox, a collection of tricks of the trade in their repertoire. If one thing doesn't work, you need to try something else. Underneath it all, you have to understand conceptually why you're doing it and what the goal is.
NW: Is it really possible to blend whole language with direct instruction in sound-letter patterns?
BERNINGER: If I were helping schools evolve, I would have tracks where you cover the same kind of material with all kids in an intellectually engaging way, but some kids get more explicit instruction. In the old days, there were a lot of worksheets—skill-and-drill stuff—that turned people off. But you can make the alphabetic principle explicit without doing drills. But I do think we need to make alphabetic principles explicit to students, and it's not always been happening—not the way that I think a lot of kids need it. Some kids need that explicitness; others can figure it out on their own. I don't think we should be drilling those kids who can figure it out on their own or who got help from their parents in figuring it out.
NW: Have schools in general made progress in working with LD kids?
BERNINGER: In the '70s most teacher education programs had very little formal instruction on how to teach reading—what kinds of things you should do in your classroom. I think that's changed in some places, but it hasn't changed everywhere. I don't want to fault any one group. I just think as a nation, we still have not come to terms with the fact that there are both biologically based and culturally based learning differences. It has nothing to do with skin color; it has to do with what's inside people's heads. We're not adequately preparing teachers in a practical sense for what they can do, day to day, in their classroom to deal with this diversity. 
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